We Are the Microsoft OneNote team - Ask Us Anything

Hi! My name is David Rasmussen, Group Program Manager for OneNote. At 10AM Pacific/1PM Eastern, the team and I will be answering questions on OneNote - so ask us almost anything for the next few hours. We're drinking mimosas and Irish coffees, but it'd be a lot more fun if we had some great questions to answer.

Let's keep the questions to stuff we know about - OneNote on any of the platforms we support:

OneNote is an application to help you keep track of things in your life. You can keep track of account numbers, students can use it to take class notes, family & groups can have a shared notebook to keep track of things.

This is David. I knew someone was going to ask us that :-). We’ve certainly heard the feedback that people want OneNote on their Macs as well. We have done a lot of engineering work recently to share code across platforms and that’s helped us bring a common base from Windows and Windows Phone to iPhone, iPad and Android as well, and that gives us a lot of flexibility. That said, the team can’t really comment on possible future products…

Please, for the love of god, make onenote have the ability to do code syntax highlighting with options and defaults for the same color schemes found in most ide's. For example, you could wrap the code you want to highlight in tags. Ex:

Hey this is a cool idea that we've actually thought of a few times (a code style). The user demand for it is small enough, that I'm not sure we'd get to it any time soon. But we have lots of folks on the team who'd love to do this... :-)
David

ink to text: I write all the time on my Tablet 2. It gets indexed so that I don't need to convert it to text, but it's great to shrink stuff down and make it esier to read.

OCR: On the desktop, when I paste images into OneNote they are searchable.

Sharing: It may sound dumb, but I share notes all the time. My wife and I split up in the grocery store. We saw items being checked off the list and met at the cash register because there wasn't anything on the list left. So convenient.

First things first....The OneNote team kicks tail. I'm a high school math teacher and I feel as though OneNote was built for me. Thanks

A few tweaks
1) I use a customized ribbon when I teach, but the customizes color pens and highlighters take up a lot of room. I wish they were smaller. I can display 4 customized pens and higlighters in the ribbon and I wish I could see 6 or 8. There is an extra 2 clicks to get hundreds of additional colors but I swear, the extra clicks are killer.
2) I wish I had more shapes to pick at choose from. Assorted triangles, right, obtuse. I wish the I had another circle which draws from the center and not the corner of the imaginary circumscribes rectangle/square.
3) How about adding more shapes like regular polygons five sides and larger?
4) I wish there was an UNDO feature which goes back 24 hours or some other date.
5) Creating a video of my screen and easy access to post the video/audio file to youtube.

Thanks for reading

I don't understand why more math teachers don't use OneNote. It is amazing for me and my students love how I post to Skydrive. Syncing has never been easier.

This is David: these are some great suggestions. We definitely are aiming to make using pens with OneNote for inking and drawing a great experience for scenarios like yours. With the new Windows 8 modern app we're going to continue to do work to make pen and color selection a better experience than what you see with the Ribbon in OneNote 2013 today. That should make it a great experience on a tablet.

For 24 hour undo, have you seen our page version feature? You can right click on a page, show page versions and see a previous version of the page and revert to that page.

While you're at it, 'shape recognition' would be nice too. If I could draw an xy axis and have it automatically convert to a nicer looking version, or have my crappy little squares or circles converted to nice ones as well, that'd be great.

Though it's mostly simplistic and not that powerful, this is one of the few S-Memo features that I'm slightly jealous of not having in OneNote.

Hello, I am a Pharmacy Student who has used your program with my Lenova Yoga for the past school year. I've been looking forward to this AMA for the past week! OneNote has worked very well, and I purchased thee entire Office package solely for this program. There are a few changes I would like to suggest, these are primarily features I've seen my friends who use other programs.

Closer zoom. OneNote does allow you to go in to 400-500% zoom, but in order to fit my notes in for certain classes, a bigger zoom would be very helpful.

Be able to rotate whatever you print in 90 degree angles. My teachers supply me with Powerpoint slideshows, so I "print" them into OneNote. However, every now and again, I'll forget to switch the slides to landscape instead of portrait. It would be really helpful to be able to rotate them inside of OneNote instead of having to print them back in.

More colors. A color wheel would work perfectly. This isn't really important, because you guys have a large number of colors, but it would be nice.

Organic Chemistry shape selections. Most of my classes are scientific in nature, so being able to place a Benzene ring or enter a number to make a long Carbon chain would be very helpful.

I really hope you guys at least read this, because this is a small list of what is otherwise far and away the best note taking program available. Thank you for everything you have done to make it, I have taken no hand written notes in the past year because of you guys!

This is David: Thanks Albird, for the great suggestions! We'll definitely look at those. No promises on when we can get to these features, but it's always good to hear what folks want. It helps us prioritize. Great to hear how you're using OneNote.

No. There is no electronic backdoor into that gives the U.S. government unfettered access to Microsoft enterprise services, or allows them to unilaterally conduct surveillance on our enterprise servers or networks. Microsoft only discloses enterprise customer information when legally required to do so, and even then, we only comply with legal orders for information about specific users, accounts, or identifiers, and would not respond to a blanket or generalized requests for customer information.

Does it make sense to you how Microsoft products are really beginning to overlap in functionality? You have OneNote, SharePoint, and even Outlook/Exchange serving similar functions. This can be an expensive redundancy in a business environment. How do you best define your product against the others?

Good question. The OneNote team and SharePoint team get along great. We work closely together to make our real time, multi-user collaboration features in OneNote work on SharePoint. Many of our business customers love using them together. Pfizer calls it "OnePoint" for short :-), and they use OneNote and SharePoint for all their drug research collaboration. We couldn't do what we've done without close cooperation with the SharePoint team...

It's amazing how simple topics like colors and names get a lot of passion around here. But to be honest, when purple was suggested for OneNote (mostly because it wasn't used by the other top apps) we were all very happy. We love purple. It's my daughters favorite color so she thinks it's cool whenever I come home with purple hair after one of our ship parties... :-)
David

It is a great piece of application, however, its editing abilities (in Windows and in general) don't even come near the capabilities of Evernote. In fact, everytime I paste to it something from a web document, I cringe to the result of broken tables, bullets and fonts.

I love the editing options in OneNote, the tables, the SMOOTH copy-pasting from web, the wiki-like linking, the always-in-sync, the multi-user editing abilities. Its great, really.

However, even though I tried again to move from Evernote to OneNote just last weekend, I encountered quite unacceptable lack of features in todays modern world:

Very very slow sync speed on Android. Every time I did any kind of change, the Android client would takes minutes upon minutes to sync. I admit that my notebook is rather large (500mb or so) but such long sync times on every single, small, edit, are just unacceptable if I am to use my mobile client seriously.

Search is very limited. No operators of any kind. Can't search by text and by tag (e.g tagged "Todo" and contains text "move"). Also can't search by multiple tags.

No "Search notebook" in OneNote web - I find it really weird that OneNote site allows you to view your OneNote, search it, and yet, it limits you to a single SECTION of the book. The whole point of a search, I'd believe, is to be able to search all the stuff you got. If I knew in what section everything is, I wouldn't need search in the first place.

Search in general just doesn't work well. Even when I tried searching for a text in a section that I know that had it (and that OneNote for Windows found), OneNote web still failed to find it.

Confusing sync on Android - When I do a search on OneNote on Android, it doesn't actually sync everything. Multiple times I had to do a manual sync just to get the latest data. It seems obvious to me that if I search on the whole notebook, I'd expect it to sync the whole notebook first.

Android OneNote in general, while it is miles ahead of the original release, is still severaly lacking. For example, while Android is unique in its features of "Sharing" that allow you to send almost every bit of information to any application, OneNote refuses to accept those. You can't share, for example, a web page you're browser to OneNote. In another example, you can't make a shortcut to a note and put it on your desktop (yes, you can do that in Evernote on Android).

I love OneNote, I think its editing capabilities are amazing and inspiring. When it comes to mobile however (mobile Android that is), web and syncing in general it shows how new it is in the field.

This isn't really a question, but I wanted to use this platform to come with you with a complaint of an actual current Evernote users that really wishes to migrate, but unfortunately can't.

P.S I know that the focus of Microsoft at the whole is on Windows Phone, however, to get there, you have to start by capturing the existing markets and that won't happen by captivating the existing users of iPhone and Android.

Thanks for the feedback and good questions...did you try the newest update which came out last week? I will try and give some answers.

Yes the sync is a bit slower on mobile compared to the other clients because of the power & speed of the phones as well as the disk IO. Also we are syncing down the content and storing it locally. Some other apps don't sync down all of the content unless you pay whereas in OneNote it just syncs down fully without paying. So yes things are a little slower at first when you get started but afterwards it will sync just the changes, doing a delta/incremental sync.

Search yeah...for the whole notebook that is something we are looking at and something we would like to get in a future update. Totally agreed about the operators. On the win32 desktop we have a limitation to use whatever Windows Desktop Search has so we are a bit limited. For the other apps we just added search so adding more operators to add later.

As for search on Android it will search whatever you have downloaded on your device. Oh and the Share intent for Android that is something we are looking at for a future update.

Thanks for this feedback...we hope to have a great experience on all devices but clearly for you on Android we should do better.

This is Dan...
Thanks for the feedback! For handwriting do you mean to create hand written notes on the mobile devices? In the most recent updates you can now view handwritten notes (from a Windows machine) on all of the mobile clients. We have heard a few people asking for this as well as password protected sections and it something we are considering for future updates of the apps.

As for choosing which section you want your quick notes to go why do you want this? Is there a particular section you want instead of quick notes? Good feedback and we are listening.

Is there a way to have basic spreadsheet functions (like autosum, sort etc.) in a OneNote 2013 table? I know you can insert a separate Excel file that appears as a sort of a print out, but I don't like using this as I need a separate file to worry about and Excel needs to open to make basic changes.

This is David: that's always a tricky trade off for us, how much of Excel functionality do we add vs embedding Excel and getting all of its power. So we went for the embedding approach. So you can insert an Excel spreadsheet that displays embedded on the OneNote page, and then you can open it and edit in Excel and the notes page will update with the spreadsheet view as you save the Excel spreadsheet.

But I understand what you're asking for. We do have sort for tables in 2013. Is sum the other main function you'd want?

This is David: we've heard the request for password protected section support on all platforms loud and clear. Definitely in our roadmap. Just a matter of getting to it in order of work. If you're interested in details, it turns out that the crypto APIs are different on the various platforms so it takes a little more work to port it over than some of our other features. Definitely on the roadmap though.

This is Alex. There are a few reasons for this. First the app is localized into 29 languages so it has all of the resources and translations into all of those languages. Many languages need specific fonts to correctly render their scripts and Office has always had a set of default fonts that we needed to include so the app would properly render your content and these aren't available on iOS. Also there is a lot of code in there to support all of the OneNote content types and that is why the app is much bigger than before. Death to Daleks!

I'm part of a small dev team and we use OneNote as a shared repository for code document. Our issue is that your search functions are not powerful enough. Have you guys thought about improving your search functions?

Great question. Glad you like those shortcuts. We thought they were handy and use them all the time. We talked to the Word team about these but it turns out it's tricky for them to use the same shortcut key. Word is used by a billion people around the world. And Ctrl+. is already used in some languages for language specific features that are important to people, so that shortcut was already taken for them... :-(

I've been using OneNote since 2007. I now use the Modern UI version basically all day long with my Surface Pro pen; In fact, OneNote was the killer app behind my reason for buying a Surface Pro. The radial menu is miles above the desktop version when using the pen 99% of the time, as I do.

The biggest grip I have is the virtual keyboard popping up all the time. It would be great if the virtual keyboard could be put into "manual" mode with an option from the radial menu or from the swipe up/down gesture to show and hide it on (very explicit) demand only.

It's an interesting problem. The Windows team designed the keyboard so that you don't have to think about it. When you tap into a text field, it pops up. When you tap out, it goes away. Normally that works great and you never have to fiddle with the keyboard. However, OneNote's special because the whole display is a giant text field.

Hi, I am a heavy OneNote user (RT, Phone and Windows). I would like to share my notes on a page level (e.g. meeting notes for a specific meeting). At the moment I can ony share the complete notebook. Are you thinking or better working on this?

This is David: that's definitely a scenario we're thinking about. Given the way our multi-user, multi-device syncing works it's non trivial to do this for just a single page within a notebook, but we're looking at it. You can of course email folks the page of notes from OneNote after the meeting (but I assume you want the real time collaboration benefits).

This is David: the answer is either 10 years or 1 month... :-). We've been working on OneNote for about 10 years now. When we started the team was very small and we only built for the desktop and there was no cloud. Now we build for multiple platforms, have a service and everything syncs, so you can work with others in near real time. It took a while to get here. But now with things like the Windows Store in Windows 8, we're sometimes updating the app in a month or two..

As it's been getting warmer this summer, we've been enjoying 25c scoops of ice cream in our cafeteria. So far we've had vanilla, chocolate, huckleberry, birthday cake, cookies and cream, some caramel...thing... More regularly, this depends on the building cafeteria.

Just a developer here, so I can't really comment on how names and branding are chosen, but having ice cream names would be pretty awesome in my personal opinion. Mint Chocolate Chip Windows, anyone?

Not a question, but I just wanted to say OneNote has completely changed my life. I manage over 20 standing meetings with clients on a weekly basis, and OneNote helps me not only track talking points for each meeting, but I'm able to write down things to talk about for future meetings so that nothing is forgotten. Very good product, if only I understood some formatting tricks better.

Nick here. Personally, everything moves so quickly that there is no time to be bored. There are features that are more flashy than others (I think user facing features are more fun than "behind-the-scenes" features), but it's all pretty interesting.

I just wanted to thank you for making the OneNote Webapp and making it available through Skydrive... I created a bunch of notebooks on my Windows box, but when I switched to Ubuntu I was boned... Uploading the notebooks to Skydrive and using the webapp was the answer and works great in all my browsers, so, thanks again!

Any plans to be able to insert diagrams (like from Visio)? I realize you can't embed it (cross-platform issues, etc) but if you could maintain the original diagram, but show a png for display use on my phone, that would still be useful. Even if on that platform it was read-only.

You should be able to do this via OneNote 2013. It works exactly like you describe. On other platforms you'll only see a non-editable image. But on 2013, you'll be able to launch Visio and edit the document.

Look for Visio Diagram under the Insert tab (only shows if you have Visio installed).

Thank you for doing this AMA, I'm a programmer myself currently developing custom Web Applications for companies that hire our services. As a programmer I often feel unappreciated and over worked. Often times I find myself questioning my decision to get into software development. I think we can agree that it's often a thankless job. How exactly do you guys cope with all the verbal abuse you'd receive from end users? How do you get trough the day? How do you continue?

I really like Onenote and have introduced it to several other people. The one feature I find is missing is the ability to display and mark up pdfs. A lot of information (manuals, articles, etc) is in this format. Have you thought about better pdf integration?